Writing a Departmental BPC Plan – Step-by-Step

BPC is a specific part of the larger work of Diversity, Equity, and inclusion (DEI). Your institution likely has many resources and allies in the DEI space that can help you in your BPC efforts.

• Identify the offices at your institution that may have ongoing activities aligned with BPC (e.g., a Dean of Students or Diversity Office). Contact individuals to get more information about relevant programs you find.
• If available, visit the website of your institution’s center for teaching and learning and look for DEI-related programs, such as inclusive teaching workshops.
• Some popular BPC activities are only successful when supported by existing relationships and programs. Check with your department to see if you have established relationships with recruiting, admissions, schools that students transfer from, or K-12 institutions.

It is not necessary to be an expert in BPC to write a good BPC plan or to contribute meaningfully to BPC, but it is helpful to understand what BPC is. NSF has other initiatives, such as broader impacts, that can also have some overlap with BPC but there are some distinct differences.

• Review the NSF BPC FAQ Item: “Which groups qualify as “underrepresented” in computing and closely related disciplines for the purpose of this initiative?”  
• Review the NSF BPC FAQ Item: “What is the difference between broader impacts and BPC?” 
• If you’d like more context about the purpose and importance of BPC, read this NCWIT blog post.  (10 minutes)
• If you would like to learn more about Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice, you can view Byte-sized DEI-J videos from the Alliance for Identity-Inclusive Computing. (40 minutes)

Plans must have the following required content: required header information, Context, Goals, Activities, Measurement. However, they vary in the space they allocate to each of these. Some plans nest the relevant activities under their related goal. Other plans separate the goals and activities and indicate which goals each activity aligns with.

• Visit the list of Verified Departmental BPC Plans and review several plans there, noticing the similarities and differences between their organization and structure.

There are three sets of checklist requirements: “Document Structure Checklist”, “Tone and Clarity Checklist”, and “Departmental BPC Plan Content Checklist”. Departmental BPC Plans must be verified by BPCnet consultants using these checklists before they can be used in Connected Project BPC Plans. The checklists have evolved over time, so not all previously verified plans may fit all of the current criteria.

• Read the Checklist for Departmental BPC Plans.

The words that are used to describe certain identities change across time and are often contested. Terminology is important because the words we use can hurt or help, exclude or welcome. Some terms reinforce stereotypes and disadvantages, invisibility, and dehumanization. New terms are created to resist this dehumanization, fight invisibility, and highlight realities as a means to challenge and dismantle disadvantage. Most plans need to refer to the communities they aim to support; you’ll revisit how to do this in step 18 after you write your goals.

• Read the Terminology Guide: Referring to Communities Underrepresented in Computing in BPC Plans. 
• Read the Common Mistakes in Departmental Plans. 
• If you’d like more context about how people describe themselves, watch some of NCWIT’s Learning About Intersectionality: Videos That Spark Conversations.

While they are referred to as “Departmental” BPC Plans, these can be written at any organizational level within an institution and there can be multiple plans within an institution. For example, you could have a plan for the whole institution, a college, a school, a department, a center, or a specific research group.

• Decide on the organizational affiliation for your plan and use it to fill in the “department name” and “institutional name” lines of the template.
• Add your contact information (a name and email address is sufficient).

Departmental BPC Plan goals are narrower in their definition than you might be used to. To get started, we recommend writing a goal related to faculty engagement first because it is a goal that every Departmental BPC Plan could include. Four Common Goal Patterns provides example templates for goals. Goals are required to be specific and time bounded. We have customized two of these templates to focus on faculty engagement. If you already know the proportion of faculty engaged in BPC activities you can use Version 1. If not, use Version 2.

• Version 1: “By [YEAR] the proportion of faculty participating in BPC activities will improve from [CURRENT VALUE] to [NEW VALUE].”
• Version 2: “Measure and improve the proportion of faculty participating in BPC activities by [YEAR].”

As noted in Four Common Goal Patterns, for ongoing activities, “by [YEAR]” may be replaced with a frequency such as “every year.”

• Add a goal to your plan related to faculty engagement in BPC.

BPC plans and activities do not need to be novel. There is a list of 60+ example activities at Example Activities to Use in BPC Plans that can be included in any BPC plan. Many plan writers find that it is helpful to customize these existing activity descriptions to align with their current and proposed activities. Many of the example activities include links with more information. You will eventually need to remove the links that are provided (to adhere to the NSF formatting rules), but we encourage you to read the additional information before removing.

• Read through the first two subsections of activities on Example Activities to Use in BPC Plans (these relate to Teaching and Mentoring, and all can support a faculty engagement goal).
• Add a first activity to your plan that can align with your first goal.

You may have members of your department who are engaged in BPC activities already.

• Email or meet with faculty, staff, and students to compile a set of ongoing BPC activities. Gather information about what each activity involves, its goals, its success thus far, opportunities for engagement, and a contact person.
• For each activity related to BPC, write a brief draft of the activity (often 2-3 sentences) that meets the following two items in the Checklist for Departmental BPC Plans: “Includes a clear description of what will occur as part of each activity” and “Includes an explicit connection to BPC for each activity.” Identifying likely faculty roles in the activity can encourage faculty involvement, but some activities can be more clearly explained without that.

Most plans will include new activities as well as current ones. Pick activities that will help achieve your goals and that take advantage of your local context as noted in Steps 1 and 2. 

• Create a list of any additional activities you may include in your plan from the examples at Example Activities to Use in BPC Plans.

In the process of drafting a Departmental BPC Plan, it is common to have activities that are not aligned with any goals and goals that have no supporting activities. However, this alignment is required by the Checklist for Departmental BPC Plans   

• For each activity, identify the goal it is intended to help achieve. Sometimes, that goal is not already in your plan so you’ll need to write it as a SMART goal or remove the activity from the plan.
• For each goal, identify at least one activity that will help achieve it. Sometimes, no such activity is already in your plan so you’ll either need to add one or remove the goal.
• For each activity/goal pair, make sure the connection between the two is evident from the text you have written. Sometimes you’ll need to add.

SMART goals are required for plans to be verified on BPCnet.org and subsequently submitted to the NSF as part of a Connected Project BPC Plan.  See SMART Goal Requirement for a brief definition of SMART goals.

• A good goal describes what you hope to achieve; if your goal also includes how you plan to achieve it, that part should be moved to an activity.
• Making a goal specific (the S in SMART) can be easier if you break broad goals into several smaller goals.
• If your goal is to do some specific activity, making that an activity instead with a more general goal can make the plan easier to read.

Common ways to phrase SMART goals is to use one of the four goal patterns noted in Four Common Goal Patterns 

• Re-word each goal as a SMART goal 

One item in the Checklist for Departmental BPC Plans is “Identifies how outcomes will be measured for each activity” with this addendum: “Some intended outcomes may be difficult to measure; in such cases, it is sufficient to measure an intermediate outcome. For example, it is sufficient to measure the number of students who receive funding to attend a diversity conference instead of the long-term impact of their attendance.”  Many plans include collecting measurement data as a BPC activity in itself. 

• For each activity, describe how its outcomes could be measured.
• If measurements are similar for multiple activities, the measurements can be grouped in their own section of the document.

The Checklist for Departmental BPC Plans requires that communities be identified with terms from NSF CISE’s definition of BPC, but many plans mention those terms only once to define another term to use in the rest of the plan. There is no single recommended term for referring to such groups of communities. See the Terminology Guide: Referring to Communities Underrepresented in Computing in BPC Plans for additional information. 

• If you have goals or activities that address particular communities, add a definition of the term(s) you use to describe those communities to your context section.

Demographic information about your students may be found in your institutional data reporting system or at https://bpcnet.org/statistics/#Tools under Postsecondary Computing Degrees Awarded (IPEDS). Some goals might also benefit from demographic information of a broader context than the department itself, such as university, state or regional demographics, or you can use the K-12 data available from https://bpcnet.org/statistics/#Tools under K-12 Enrollment (CCD) . 

• Add (to the context or the appropriate goal) any demographic information that you have a goal of changing.
• Add (to the context or the appropriate activity) any local resources that may help an activity succeed.

Since Verified Departmental BPC Plans can be used in Connected Project BPC Plans submitted to the NSF (see Creating a Meaningful Connected Project BPC Plan), it is necessary to have an identifier by which PIs can refer to each activity. This is also required in the Checklist for Departmental BPC Plans.

• For each activity, label it with a unique identifier.

The Checklist for Departmental BPC Plans includes a requirement to identify “a contact person for each activity”. Many plans do this by providing the name of an individual (or a role such as “Director of Graduate Studies”) in parentheses at the end of each activity. Some plans include a sentence explaining that the contact for the Department BPC Plan is also the contact for all activities. The contact person should be available to help new people join the activity and answer questions about it.

• Add contact information for each activity or group of related activities.

There are many aspects of a Departmental BPC Plan and it is easy to overlook some things while working on others. A pass to look for things that often get overlooked can improve the quality of your plan. BPC consultants will also help ensure that you meet all of the requirements.

• Review the Document Structure section of the Checklist for Departmental BPC Plans.
• Review the Tone and Clarity section of the Checklist for Departmental BPC Plans.
• Review the Common Mistakes in Departmental BPC Plans.
• Revise your plan to remove any of these mistakes you may have made.

The Checklist for Departmental BPC Plans is used by BPCnet consultants as the criteria for if a plan is ready to be verified and published on BPCnet.org. Reviewing each item in the checklist before submitting it can help the verification process go more smoothly.

• Review your plan against each item in the Checklist for Departmental BPC Plans, editing it as needed to meet each item in that checklist.
• If you need to shorten your plan to meet the page limit, consider removing details from the context section that are not directly related to the goals and activities; merging related activities; or removing descriptions of activities that few members of the department expect to engage in.

Internal feedback and approval are important to ensure buy-in from faculty and others who will be performing the plan’s activities. It is common that most faculty, staff, and students are unaware of many of the BPC activities within a department. Sharing a draft of the plan for feedback can be an additional way to provide transparency about the ongoing BPC activities. You may find it helpful to label activities with (new) or (ongoing) to clearly communicate with internal stakeholders; such labels are not needed on the submitted plan.

• Disseminate a link to your plan with requests for individuals to share ongoing activities that are missing and any new activities that they would like to see added. 

You will receive confirmation that your plan has been received, after which it will be routed to a BCPnet.org consultant to review and verify, using the Checklist for Departmental BPC Plans and the consultants’ expertise. Typically, it will be returned with some suggested revisions before being verified and published on BPCnet.org. After your Departmental BPC Plan is Verified, BPCnet will not post your plan online without your confirmation. This means that you can seek final approval from your unit after your plan is Verified. Additional changes can likely be Verified quickly.

• Visit https://bpcnet.org/submit-plan/, fill out the form (it’s multiple pages), including uploading a .docx of your plan.